An industry is typically comprised of business entities that interact with other business entities. The business entities may include market participants who may use software tools to make decisions regarding how best to interact with other business entities.
An industry may include any number of market participants in a value chain. For example, a consumer products industry may have participants including a component supplier, a manufacturer, a distributor, a retailer as well as others. An oil and gas value chain may include participants involved in activities such as exploration and production, refining and service station end consumer as well as others.
The market participants in an industry may interact with other market participants in the industry or participants from other industries. Each interaction may involve business processes that may vary in complexity depending on the relationship between the participants and factors affecting the industry. For example, a manufacturer in a consumer products industry may have a need for a business process to manage an inventory of components from a supplier to reduce the cost of manufacturing a product. The manufacturer in this example may choose to implement a business process such as supply chain management (SCM) or materials resource planning (MRP) to enhance inventory control.
A market participant may have a need for many business processes. The participant may  be desire to select from many processes available a subset that is most relevant and value-adding to the participant's role. For example, retailer in a consumer products industry may determine that a process for enhancing end consumer goodwill is more relevant than a process for managing inventory. In contrast, a wholesale distributor in a oil and gas industry may decide that a process for managing inventory is more relevant than a process for enhancing end consumer goodwill.